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TGIF Now IFIF

May 11, 2025 By admin

TGIFI miss Fridays.

More specifically, I miss that Thank God It’s Friday feeling one has when one is slogging along in a Monday through Friday job.

When I first started working at my last job, I was expected to show up on Saturday mornings because the office was open until noon. “Showing the flag…”  is a concept I never bought into. Just because the boss was in the office didn’t make the employees feel any more valuable or hate working on Saturday any less.

I always hated that, so eventually I convinced the owners that having the office open on Saturday morning with a skeleton staff to take care of three or four customers wasn’t really necessary. Of course what I really meant was: I HATE having to come to work on Saturday morning.

We had a strong online presence so 90% of customer service issues could be accomplished by visiting the newspaper website.

So those of us who showed up on Saturday just screwed around. Some tried to “save work” from Monday through Friday so do on Saturday to make the time go more quickly.

They were rare.

Of course we had a newsroom that showed up at various hours on Saturday to do their thing for the Sunday newspaper, and there was a production schedule that included Saturday work.

But there’s nothing like that Thank God It’s Friday feeling when it means Saturday and Sunday are available for just screwing around.

I like being retired because every day is available for screwing around.

But sometimes I Forget It’s Friday.

Mark Van Patten originally wrote this for his blog Going Like Sixty circa 2008 and we republished it on BoomSpeak. We just liked it so much we’re running it again in hopes that we can get him to contribute more for us. Oh, and yeah, he has been married to the same woman since 1968.

Filed Under: ESSAY

Love Is…

May 11, 2025 By admin

Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddist monk and peace activistLove, according to the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh, is a living, breathing thing, but for the life of me, I can never remember her name.

No matter how many times we meet, Love’s name just goes in one ear and out the other. She keeps coming around, though, always unannounced, and when she does, I stare, mute, a vague recognition in my eye, her name on the tip of my tongue, escaping me, only to arrive with the force of a hurricane after she has gone.

Perhaps, I think, if I could meet Love in a quieter place, where the din of society’s messages is hushed, I would see her and recall her name with ease, but society’s messages are everywhere there are people, even by the fireplace in the cozy living room on a snowy day, my adult daughter curled up on the couch, deep in a book.

Perhaps it would help if I used a mnemonic device. I might think of something that rhymes with Love. Or repeat the name three times. Maybe I could associate it with a color. But how would that work, I wonder. Love never looks the same way twice. What will prompt my memory in the absence of a constant?

I’ve finished my bowl of Mexican wedding soup. My son-in-law goes back for seconds. My daughter tells a joke about an architect, and my granddaughter delights in gumming and swallowing yet another meatball from the tray of her high-end highchair, and something within me stirs.

A moment later, I watch as my son-in-law takes a breath, purses his lips, and blows a cool breeze through my granddaughter’s downy hair, eliciting a squeal of delight.

And this time, I recognize her right away. “Oh, yes! Hello, Love,” I say. “It’s ever so nice to see you again!”

Tricia Bernard lives in Charlotte, NC

Filed Under: ESSAY

Cash Money

April 27, 2025 By admin

frozen $100 billsQuestion. When you walk out the door to run errands or shop, do you grab your wallet, the car fob and some cash? It’s the cash element that I’m curious about. Are baby boomers the last proponents of paying with cash? Sure seems that way when just about everyone is tapping their credit or debit cards at the check-out counter.

An Empower survey of American attitudes toward cash, indicated that 52% of respondents said cash was king, 49% said they felt safer with cash, and 27% said they carry cash with them every day.

If you’ve been overseas lately, you may have noticed that no one there is using cash. They hold their phone near the payment terminal in their favorite cafe, it beeps and they are out the door with their coffee.

According to CapitalOne, as of March 2025, 47.8% of American adults make NO cash purchases in a typical week. More than 63% expect a cashless future and globally, point-of-sale transactions were 85% cashless in 2024.

No-cash establishments are very common in Europe so it won’t be long before we see it here in the U.S. There is no law that requires businesses to accept cash and COVID ramped up the trend to go cashless for hygienic reasons (the filthy lucre argument).

For baby boomers, the lack of control over their spending may be the biggest disadvantage to going cashless, along with the lack of privacy regarding how you’re using your money, and those pesky data breaches that keep cropping up to expose us to fraud. Sometimes you just want to buy something without anyone keeping tabs on where your money is going.

It just might be the tactile experience of handling cash that still makes it attractive to boomers. You can count it and rest assured that you have enough to pay for a movie ticket and some popcorn. You leave home with $70 and when you get back home you can count it again and know that you spent some but still have $45 remaining. It’s elemental that way but surely we won’t be able to hold out when they put a chip in our foreheads and we just need to nod to record our payment on the way out the door.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Filed Under: ESSAY

Google as Side Show

April 27, 2025 By admin

tree falls on truckI’ve never seen a circus sideshow except in movies. I’ve read about them in books. But not real ones. I get the idea however…freak shows, hairy ladies, congenital twins and the like for folks who lived constrained and tedious lives. There definitely was a market for idle curiosity in the plain beige existence of middle America.

Well, all that has changed. Television takes us around the world. Movies expand our awareness of cultures and places otherwise unseen. But there is one medium that somehow feels like the offspring of the circus sideshow – the internet, specifically Google. We don’t need to wait for the circus to come to town. It comes to us, fits in our hand and updates daily with short visual clips of worldwide phenomena. How enlightening and helpful to the ACDC syndrome in all of us. And if not exactly that, some of the visual slots if not sporadic and unrelated can actually be thought informational, although I would hate to take a test on what I had just spent a half hour perusing online.

The subjects run to: felling trees, catching fish, wild animals, daring stunts, jokes and cartoons, woodworking, gags and gaffs. The variety of themes far outreaches a circus sideshow. But it changes so often in such short intervals that somehow it can feel like you’re attending class with a clever and animated teacher: This is fun. That is interesting. Look at the food, the life style, the clothes.

It amounts to curiosity candy with a few news fillers to justify the side trip down novelty lane. The distraction on a hand-held device may be justified because of the scope—international awareness, do-it-yourself hints, fitness suggestions, recipes. Not to mention sports, jokes, and travelogues. An hour of online scanning can feel like a semester in a college class broken into fascinating bits rather than a three month long, in-depth research of a specific topic like marital customs in Elizabethan literature.

This breeze through new, ever changing topics is interesting, exciting and engaging with no research papers or tests to weigh it down. Think college light. Exposure and learning at the tap of an icon. Too bad there isn’t a way to get a degree in internet exposure.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/

Filed Under: ESSAY

Bared Knees

April 27, 2025 By admin

short skirt from the 1960sA moment seared in my adolescent baby boomer brain. I was walking upstairs for algebra class. As usual, I passed Marsha on the way. She was “bad,” and getting “badder” fast. That day she appeared with a skirt above the knee — the first girl in my high school that dared to cross the Rubicon.

The baby boomer generation sexual revolution of the 1960s began in the bursting-at-the-modesty 1950s. The female knee became the symbol of pop culture risque.

Approaching the image from below enhanced the effect. She wore a thin white silk blouse collar up — hood style, the top two buttons undone, no bra. I could see the outline of her nipples. And she had bleached the pony tail on her jet black hair blond. As usual, her eyes looked like a hungry fox. She sported a new, very bright red on her pouting lips. A “baby” boomer Lolita before Lolita. Her attitude was classic bitchy: detached, you can’t have me, but maybe if you’re the quarterback, and beg.

The guy ahead of me stumbled at the sight and I bumped into him, causing a chain reaction of rear-enders and flying books. She strolled right by the chaos, smirking like a rock princess.

Marsha ended up having an affair with a geography teacher. The joke going around was that he showed her places she’d never been before. She got pregnant, he got fired. The femme fatale dropped out of school, worked as a waitress, then settled down with a truck driver for the local Caterpillar factory. I recognized Marsha at my class reunion twenty years later only after a classmate pointed her out. Alcohol, four children and sixty pounds had changed her appearance, but she still had the shortest skirt in the room. She seemed happy.

Terry Hamburg blogged about the exciting and revolutionary baby boomer years and wrote this circa 2009. It’s part of our Oldies But Goodies Best of BoomSpeak collection.

Filed Under: ESSAY

Another Day, Another List

April 5, 2025 By admin

older man writing down a listThere are people who just sit around making lists to put online. If you don’t already know it, the point of the posts is to get you to click on as many pages as possible, thereby exposing you to a ton of ads. You knew that right? I mean you knew it after the fifth time you got suckered into going through all those pages for nothing.

Just recently, the list that caught my attention was a list of concepts that baby boomers believed in, but subsequent generations will never understand. Intrigued, I went through the list (so that you would not have to…you’re welcome).

Numero uno on the list was Having loyalty to one employer. Not I, but many boomers took a job right out of college and retired from the same company. Gen Z job hoppers give it 2 years and move on.

Number two. Owning a home. Sadly, only 21% of millennials polled believe that will ever happen for them.

Number three. Phone calls vs texting. Girlfriends and boyfriends talked on the phone for hours. You had a sore ear when you finally hung up…no speaker phone button then. A quarter of 18 to 34 year olds say they never answer the phone. They are all Gen-Text.

Number four. Hard work? Or Work-Life balance. Boomers chose the former and younger generations, particularly Gen Z are not buying into it. If their employer doesn’t allow for a balanced lifestyle, they move on.

Number five. Marriage as a life goal. Boomers paired up early and often. In many cases, too early and too often. Younger generations may be okay with being with someone for life, but marriage – not so much.

Number six. Owning a car(s) was a big deal for boomers. It was our ticket to freedom and the ability to roam. Younger gens user ride-sharing apps and many have not bothered to get a license.

Number seven. Privacy versus sharing. Boomers are rather circumspect about their private lives while later generations find it totally normal to share their innermost life details to the point where we think they are oversharing. That’s not stopping them.

But that’s not all. Buying used instead of new. Respecting authority without question. Using television as their news source. Paying with cash. You can guess which side younger gens came down on without my dissection.

No, don’t thank me for saving you the trouble of reading another list. It was my pleasure.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

Filed Under: ESSAY

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